British Library
Subtitle: Ministry of Defense maps
Series: Nineteenth Century Collections Online: Maps and Travel Literature; Nineteenth Century Collections Online: Maps and Travel Literature
Publisher: [publisher not identified]
Published: 1840
Place of publication: [Place of publication not identified]
Language: eng
Number of pages: 1278
Subjects: Military maps; Maps; Colonies; Great Britain. Ministry of Defence; Great Britain
Description: In 1853, Basil Jackson, a graduate of the British Royal Military College who had served twenty years as a field engineer and taught military surveying at the East India Company's Military Seminary at Addiscombe, published the fourth edition of his Treatise on Military Surveying. "Military surveying," he said, is the "art of describing the face of country with reference to its capacity for warlike operations." In general, he argued, "it should abound in details, and be extremely minute and particular respecting mountains and their passes; points at which a river or morass may be crossed; localities offering military positions; nature of forests, " (p. 1). The sections of his book summarize the instruments and methods available to mid-century military mapping: "On Military Sketching with the Prismatic Compass," "On Surveying with the Theodolite," "On Levelling," "Military Reconnoissance [sic]," and "Tables for Computing Altitudes, from Observations with the Mountain Barometer." Reflecting the already extensive global responsibilities of the British military, he noted that it mattered not whether the war was to be fought in a "semi-barbarous country" or in Europe, where there were to be found authoritative maps and statistical reports: in either case, a particular knowledge would have to be acquired on the ground through military reconnaissance. Such reconnaissance necessarily included places where combatants could ford rivers, move artillery over bridges, avoid unsurpassable obstacles, anticipate fortifications, commandeer the heights, secure food and water, find lumber for construction, and so on. The maps accumulated by the Ministry of Defence and selected for this cartographic survey of the long nineteenth century include maps and plans created by the most sophisticated cartographers with the greatest corporate and governmental institutional support and hand-drawn sketches rapidly drafted in secret in preparation for combat. They will be of great interest to scholars tracing the development of skills in the accuracy and conventions of topographical mapmaking, to students of the major conflicts in which Britain was engaged between 1780 and the end of the First World War, and to those mainly interested in the relationship of mapmaking to national and ethnic identity formation.
Notes: Date range of documents: 1840-1935.

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